Page 15 - Security Today, November/December 2022

tomated recording, at the edge, while the cloud is often used to conduct further fo- rensic analysis. This provides for faster situational awareness and better sharing of the computational workload. Major cloud providers realize this. They have shifted operations to process actionable insights at the edge, using cloud comput- ing to engage in trend analysis and pat- tern recognition. The result is that hybrid deployments have become increasingly popular, with organizations relying on both edge and cloud processing to gener- ate the real-time and long-term analysis they need. The benefits are clear and we will see greater adoption in the future, and evolution, of hybrid computing. Trend 2. The Metadata Revolution Is Here to Stay This plays into the hybrid deployments trend, but it is also important to recognize the specific role that metadata plays. Pro- cessed at the edge, video is tagged and cat- egorized with key identifiers. This includes vehicle color, license plate number, direc- tion of travel, time of day and more. All of the information about the scene is now in once place, and if something strikes the system as interesting or suspicious, a hu- man operator can go directly to the edge device and pull the specific video clip they want to see (or even a live feed), rather than sifting through hours of video. “As we move into 2023, those changes are worth keeping an eye on—both because of how they have already affected the industry, and how they promise to affect change it in the future.” This has obvious security uses, but it also allows businesses to leverage this technology for operational efficiency and business intelligence purposes. By tracking the number of people in a store, how they travel throughout the space, what prod- ucts they gravitate towards, and other in- sights, retailers can improve the customer experience in significant ways. That is just one use case—as this technology becomes more common; we can expect to see more industries leverage metadata to gener- ate valuable insights to further both their business and security goals. Trend 3. Computer Vision Will Become the Norm The trend toward embracing computer vi- sion is one that will only continue to grow. A Lot Of People/Shutterstock.com quire vast amounts of not only bandwidth, but storage space as well. Fortunately, the recent development of Deep Learning Processing Units (DLPUs) has dramati- cally increased the processing power of modern IOT Devices such as cameras, al- lowing them to conduct onboard process- ing and run analytics natively at the net- work edge. As a result, only the relevant metadata (and maybe a few seconds of video) needs to be sent to the cloud. What does this mean? In practical terms, it means that key decisions, like whether to issue an alert or trigger an au- WWW.SECURITYTODAY.COM 15